Sunday, October 25, 2015

Docker is one of the fastest growing trends in IT. It allows fast deployment of services and applications on a Linux machine (and, with some limits, on other operating systems). Compared to other methods of deploying databases, such as virtual machines or application isolation, it offers faster operations and better performance.
Many people, surprised by the sudden advance of this technology, keep asking What is Docker? And why you should use it?
I will write soon an article with a deep comparison of the three methods (VM, container, sandbox), but for now, we should be satisfied with a few basic facts:

Docker is a Linux container. It deploys every application as a series of binary layers, containing just the minimum dependencies (libraries and applications) to make the service work;

It stores images in a central registry, from where the docker client can download them quickly;

By its definition, it is lightweight. If you have the images already in your system, deployment of the service happens in seconds.

Unlike virtual machines, where you can deploy virtualized Windows and other non-Linux environment, Docker is Linux-only. You can virtualize every service, provided that it runs on Linux.

Docker can run applications in various flavors of Linux at once. It actually makes the Linux flavor dependency transparent, to the point that the users barely realize that.

Installing Docker

Docker installation is pretty much straightforward. The Docker documentation covers the basics and the fine points of installing in any operating system. Rather than repeating the procedure here, I recommend looking the pages for Ubuntu, Mac OS X, or Windows.
Once the installation is complete, the commands shown in this article will apply to all platforms. When there are exceptions, it will be noted in the text.

Thursday, October 08, 2015

During the PerconaLive conference in Amsterdam, I attended a session where I heard a good piece of advice about using GTID. It amounts to: look at SHOW SLAVE STATUS output, and if you see more than one line in the Executed_Gtid_Set field, this tells you immediately if someone has written on a slave database.
This is good advice. Let's dissect it. Here is what a regular slave looks like, when nobody has messed up with it:

What you see here is a slave that has received transactions from a single source (Retrieved_Gtid_Set lists only one GTID set) and has applied data from a single source (also Executed_Gtid_Set shows a single item.)
Notice that this advice holds true even when the slave being considered is an intermediate one, i.e. a relay slave which is master of one or more slaves. Due to the nature of GTIDs, even though the intermediate slave is recording the transactions to its own binary log, the transaction identifier does not change. Thus you should see a clean set of transactions throughout the chain. For example, if you have another slave that is replicating from slave #2, you would see something like this:

Monday, October 05, 2015

I have released MySQL-Sandbox 3.1.01, which is the first release after the move to GitHub. While the changes are not so spectacular (it's a minor release, with mostly bug fixes), I am pleased to see that the move has started producing collaboration. Two of the changes were provided by Daniël van Eeden and Mark Leith, who have scratched some of their own itches by providing useful patches.

All in all, this period of working with GitHub has been liberating. Although Bazaar plays with the same principles of git, it lacks most of the tools and the know-how which characterizes git. Add to this that also my team has moved Tungsten Replicator to Github, and with that I found myself all of a sudden free of old revision control systems, and master of my own time.

Back to MySQL-Sandbox: while its enhancements may not amount to much, it helped me to discover several bugs in MySQL, some of which were addressed and solved quickly. So, I have had a deeper relationship with the community, with the experience of being at both ends of the collaboration ops.

The last notable piece of news about this release is that it has been tested with the latest and greatest available: a preview of MySQL 5.7.9 and the latest MariaDB 10.1.6. With this, I hope to witness a GA release of either flavor that does not break MySQL-Sandbox. We'll see!